How To Make A Fun One Shot TTRPG Adventure!

in this video I want to show you how I write and design fun ttrpg one shots I just love one shots whether it's a single session distraction from a larger campaign or it's rolling up some fresh characters for a fun night of gaming there's just something about designing and playing a start to finish game with a group of friends one night that is so satisfying now I've been thinking a lot about dungeon design lately for a couple of reasons one is that everybody is excited about dungeon 23 if you aren't familiar Sean McCoy came up with this wonderful idea for a year-long creative project every day you describe a single room of a dungeon and then at the end of the month you have 30 rooms or an entire floor of a dungeon finished and then after 12 months you have 12 floors an entire Mega dungeon that you've created from just a little bit of work each day so even though I'm not personally participating in Dungeon 23 I do think it is an awesome way an awesome low stakes way of kind of building a creative practice for yourself and it's been really really interesting seeing how other people are taking on the project and seeing what they're creating by just building a little room at a time each day and I think the cool thing about this dungeon 23 project is that it really puts a spotlight on process and designing the designing process and it's really got me thinking and reflecting about my own dungeon design process so yeah I already make a new tabletop role-playing game Zine every month on my patreon so the whole dungeon 23 project feels a little bit redundant for me personally but one of my goals for this year is to run more games and I've realized that the biggest role block for me for running games frequently is the amount of time it takes to to prep the the before the actual running the game part now I'm sure this is going to be an ongoing process for me and I'm sure I'll make more videos about prepping and running games as the year goes on but I thought it would be fun to take a closer look at one of these three One-Shot Adventures that I wrote for my goons and ghosts tabletop role-playing game and sort of reverse engineer it to figure out how to make writing and prepping future Adventures a little bit easier okay so let's take a look at the department of chaos it's basically a dungeon inside a Target the players are these Ghost Hunters that have been hired to take care of some possessed Shoppers oh yeah uh spoilers for this adventure by the way okay so the story is these little demon Critters are possessing people and causing all kinds of trouble throughout the store and once enough chaos is caused they summon Abaddon the demon Prince of chaos himself okay so that's the gist of the story it's pretty simple this is a one shot uh but let's take a closer look at the design and writing of this adventure and reverse engineering okay on the back of the pamphlet I have the hook written out the players get a call and accept the job it's pretty simple but it works great for a one shot next if we open the pamphlet there's a list of characters NPCs that are wandering around the store and then the chaos demon enemies I really like playing different characters in my game so I always throw in a bunch of NPCs you could totally have less than this and put in more monsters you know whatever works for your story and you'll also notice that these chaos demons only have a few stats listed goons and ghosts is a really mechanically simple and easy to run game so not much work is needed to get into the numbers side of things which for me and my artist's brain that is very helpful I guess it's important to collect stats and stuff for your monsters as you're writing them in either case I do like to list out some unique abilities for each monster in this case the demons can jump and climb they can explode and bite and possess people I think adding unique abilities is the stuff that makes battles fun and interesting for the players okay next up we have our map and a list of the areas throughout the store basically like dungeon rooms and the nice thing about setting an adventure inside a Target is that it's really easy to describe you know everybody's been into a big box department store so players will already have an image of what this place looks like in their head when you're writing out your adventure you might need to spend a little bit more time describing setting you know I always like to focus on the senses what does it look like smell like feel like what are the players gonna hear and and taste uh maybe you don't need to focus so much on taste now one thing you can see is that I've only listed out one or two points for each section of the store I really like how the old school essential dungeon Adventures are formatted basically they just write down the most obvious stuff first and then what the players can find when they explore a little bit comes next and this really seems like a good method to me for writing out dungeon rooms it's it's easy to write and it's easy to run with just a little bit of information now because this is a one shot all about chaos demons I've included a lot of Randomness to this adventure the demons move around the sections of the store randomly I think it's fun because each time you run the adventure it'll play a little bit differently and I just think adding the these sort of elements that are thematically appropriate to the adventurer will make each one shot feel unique and important and lastly if we flip to the back page there is the big boss battle with Abaddon the harbinger of chaos again he's got a bunch of abilities like the other monsters but then there's also some fun chaotic random stuff he can transform the players and each round of combat some random event happens around him I find that most of my one shots tend to have some sort of Boss monster or climactic finale I think one shots benefit from having this sort of succeed or fail State at the end it makes the game session feel more complete you know I mean maybe this isn't true but it feels right to me I don't know what do you think okay so reverse engineering this adventure we have a hook we have NPCs and monsters we've got a map and descriptions of the locations and we have a final encounter as you're writing your own adventure I don't think these things need to be planned out in any particular order it's more important to work on the stuff where the ideas are currently flowing but I think if you can fill out this entire list you'll have basically made a really great One-Shot adventure and you know what it sort of sounds to me like we're we're writing a story we have all of the elements right there's an inciting incident there's characters there's setting there's conflict the only thing we're missing is plot but the plot comes from us actually playing the game right I think it's really fun to take a look back at the stuff that we've made or take a look at stuff other people have made and analyze it and figure out how we can make our own fun adventures obvious obviously there is a ton more to be said about writing your own adventures and prepping for your games I will definitely be making more videos as I experiment and refine my process over the year if you're interested in checking out goons and ghosts it's available in my online shop it comes with the rule book character sheets and these three One-Shot Adventures if you're interested in running or playing in a game about busting ghosts I think this is a really fun option if I do say so myself if you'd like to support the channel and check out other Adventures I've made there's a link down in the description to my patreon every month I write a new adventure and mail out scenes to my patrons put a lot of work into these books and I'm really proud of them and if you sign up you get access to all of the old stuff as well okay let me know if you have any tricks for writing Adventures or prepping your games down in the comments thank you so so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one see ya [Music]

Channel: JP Coovert

Views: 15,412

Keywords: one shot, adventure, table top role playing game, how to, tutorial, dnd campaigns, world building, dungeons and dragons, dungeons & dragons, game master, dungeon master, world building dnd, worldbuilding, draw your dnd world, writing d&d adventures

Id: l6G_eKuxw0w

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 14 2023